Amazon Neptune, a new fast, reliable graph database, makes it easy
for customers to build applications on highly connected datasets

November 29, 2017 01:54 PM Eastern Standard Time

SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Today at AWS re:Invent, Amazon Web Services Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com
company (NASDAQ: AMZN), announced new database capabilities for Amazon
Aurora and Amazon DynamoDB, and introduced Amazon Neptune, a new fully
managed graph database service. Amazon Aurora now includes the ability
to scale out database reads and writes across multiple data centers for
even higher performance and availability. Amazon Aurora Serverless is a
new deployment option that makes it easy and cost-effective to run
applications with unpredictable or cyclical workloads by auto-scaling
capacity with per-second billing. With Global Tables, Amazon DynamoDB is
now the first fully managed database service that provides true
multi-master, multi-region read and writes, offering high-performance
and low-latency for globally distributed applications and users. Amazon
Neptune is AWS’s new fast, reliable, and fully managed graph database
service that makes it easy for developers to build and run applications
that work with highly connected datasets. To get started with Amazon
Aurora and Amazon DynamoDB, and to learn more about Amazon Neptune,
visit: https://aws.amazon.com/products/databases.

The days of the one-size-fits-all database are over. For many years, the
relational database was the only option available to application
developers. And, while relational databases are great for applications
that log transactions and store up to terabytes of structured data,
today’s developers need a variety of databases to serve the needs of
modern applications. These applications need to store petabytes of
unstructured data, access it with sub-millisecond latency, process
millions of requests per second, and scale to support millions of users
all around the world. It's not only common for modern companies to use
multiple database types across their various applications, but also to
use multiple database types within a single application. Since
introducing Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) in 2009, AWS
has expanded its database offerings to provide customers the right
database for the right job. This includes the ability to run six
relational database engines with Amazon RDS (including Amazon Aurora, a
fully MySQL/PostgreSQL compatible database engine with at least as
strong durability and availability as commercial grade databases but at
1/10th of the cost); a highly scalable and fully managed NoSQL database
service with DynamoDB; and a fully managed in-memory data store and
cache in Amazon ElastiCache. Now, with the introduction of Amazon
Neptune, developers can extend their applications to work with highly
connected data such as social feeds, recommendations, drug discovery, or
fraud detection.

“Nobody provides a better, more varied selection of databases than AWS,
and it's part of why hundreds of thousands of customers have embraced
AWS database services, with hundreds more migrating every day,” said
Raju Gulabani, Vice President, Databases, Analytics, and Machine
Learning, AWS. “These customers are moving to our built-for-the-cloud
database services because they scale better, are more cost-effective,
are well integrated with AWS’s other services, provide customers relief
(and freedom) from onerous old guard database providers, and free them
from the constraints of a one-database-for-every-workload model. We will
continue to listen to what customers tell us they want to solve, and
relentlessly innovate and iterate on their behalf so they have the right
tool for each job.”

Tens of thousands of customers are using Amazon Aurora because it
delivers the performance and availability of the highest-grade
commercial databases at a cost more commonly associated with open
source, making it the fastest-growing service in AWS history. Amazon
Aurora’s scale-out architecture lets customers seamlessly add up to 15
low-latency read replicas across three Availability Zones (AZs),
achieving millions of reads per second. With its new Multi-Master
capability, Amazon Aurora now supports multiple write master nodes
across multiple Availability Zones (AZs). Amazon Aurora Multi-Master is
designed to allow applications to transparently tolerate failures of any
master--or even a service level disruption in a single AZ—with zero
application downtime and sub-second failovers. This means customers can
scale out performance and minimize downtime for applications with the
most demanding throughput and availability requirements. Amazon Aurora
Multi-Master will add multi-region support for globally distributed
database deployments in 2018.

Expedia.com is one of the world's largest full service travel sites,
helping millions of travelers per month easily plan and book travel.
“Expedia’s high-volume data needs were met easily with Amazon Aurora by
scaling out while maintaining high performance,” said Gurmit Singh
Ghatore, Principal Database Engineer, Expedia. “Amazon Aurora
Multi-Master will take its scale and uptime even further, which is
really exciting. Amazon Aurora is now the first choice database for most
of our relational database needs.”

Many AWS customers have applications with unpredictable, intermittent,
or cyclical usage patterns that may not need the power and performance
of Amazon Aurora all of the time. For example, dev/test environments run
only a portion of each day, and blogs spike usage with new posts. With
Amazon Aurora Serverless, customers no longer have to provision or
manage database capacity. The database automatically starts, scales, and
shuts down based on application workload. Customers simply create an
endpoint through the AWS Management Console, specify the minimum and
maximum capacity needs of their application, and Amazon Aurora handles
the rest. Customers pay by the second for database capacity when the
database is in use.

Zendesk builds software for better customer relationships. It empowers
organizations to improve customer engagement and better understand their
customers. "Responsiveness and reliability are incredibly important to
the organizations around the world who use Zendesk to engage with their
customers. We’ve designed our enterprise-level operations and technology
architecture to exacting standards, and we’re big fans of Amazon Aurora
because it provides the high performance and availability we need in a
database," said David Bernstein, Director of Operations Services
Management at Zendesk. "We’re excited about the introduction of Amazon
Aurora Serverless because it means we can more efficiently apply that
same high performance and availability to our less predictable
workloads, without requiring granular management of database capacity to
do so.”

Amazon DynamoDB is a fully managed, seamlessly scalable NoSQL database
service. More than a hundred thousand AWS customers use Amazon DynamoDB
to deliver consistent, single-digit millisecond latency for some of the
world’s largest mobile, web, gaming, ad tech, and Internet of Things
(IoT) applications. As customers build geographically distributed
applications, they find they need the same low latency and scalability
for their users around the world. With Global Tables, Amazon DynamoDB
now supports multi-master capability across multiple regions. This
allows applications to perform low-latency reads and writes to local
Amazon DynamoDB tables in the same region where the application is being
used. This means a consumer using a mobile app in North America
experiences the same response times when they travel to Europe or Asia
without requiring developers to add complex application logic. Amazon
DynamoDB Global Tables also provide redundancy across multiple regions,
so databases remain available to the application even in the unlikely
event of a service level disruption in a single AZ or single region.
Developers can set up Amazon DynamoDB Global Tables with just a few
clicks in the AWS Management Console, simply selecting the regions where
they want their tables to be replicated. Amazon DynamoDB handles the
rest.

Customers also need a quick, easy, and cost-effective way to back up
their Amazon DynamoDB tables – whether just a few gigabytes or hundreds
of terabytes – for long-term archival and compliance, and for short-term
retention and data protection. With On-demand backup, Amazon DynamoDB
customers can now instantly create full backups of their data in just
one click, with no performance impact on their production applications.
And, Point in Time Restore (PITR) allows customers to restore their data
up to the minute for the past 35 days, providing protection from data
loss due to application errors. On-demand backup is generally available
today, with point-in-time restore coming in early 2018.

“Customers around the world use Amazon retail websites every day to shop
online. To provide the best possible discovery, purchasing, and delivery
experience to every customer no matter where they live, Amazon
increasingly needs databases capable of millisecond read/write latency
with data that’s available globally,” said Dave Treadwell, VP of
eCommerce Foundation, Amazon.com. “We already use Amazon DynamoDB for
its scalability and speed, and we need that same performance with
globally synchronized data. Global Tables enable us to process
Amazon.com customer requests in the nearest AWS region for optimal
performance, and provides peace of mind by keeping data in sync across
each of our application stacks, all without having to write complex
failover logic.”

Many applications being built today need to understand and navigate
relationships between highly connected data to enable use cases like
social applications, recommendation engines, and fraud detection. For
example, a developer building a news feed into a social app will want
the feed to prioritize showing users the latest updates from their
family, from friends whose updates they “like” a lot, and from friends
who live close to them. Amazon Neptune efficiently stores and navigates
highly connected data, allowing developers to create sophisticated,
interactive graph applications that can query billions of relationships
with millisecond latency. Amazon Neptune’s query processing engine is
optimized for both of the leading graph models, Property Graph and W3C's
Resource Description Framework (RDF), and their associated query
languages, Apache TinkerPop Gremlin and RDF SPARQL, providing customers
the flexibility to choose the right approach based on their specific
graph use case.

Amazon Neptune storage scales automatically, with no downtime or
performance degradation. Amazon Neptune is highly available and durable,
automatically replicating data across multiple AZs and continuously
backing up data to Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3). Amazon
Neptune is designed to offer greater than 99.99 percent availability and
automatically detect and recover from most database failures in less
than 30 seconds. Amazon Neptune also provides advanced security
capabilities, including network security through Amazon Virtual Private
Cloud (VPC), encryption at rest using AWS Key Management Service (KMS),
and encryption in transit using Transport Layer Security (TLS).

Thomson Reuters is the world’s leading source of news and information
for professional markets. “Our customers are increasingly required to
navigate a complex web of global tax policies and regulations. We needed
an approach to model the sophisticated corporate structures of our
largest clients to deliver an end-to-end tax solution,” said Tim
Vanderham, Chief Technology Officer, Thomson Reuters Tax and Accounting.
“We use a microservices architecture approach for our platforms and are
beginning to leverage Amazon Neptune as a graph-based system to quickly
create links within the data.”

Siemens is a global technology powerhouse that has stood for engineering
excellence, innovation, quality, reliability and internationality for
170 years. “At Siemens, we need to manage data, make it available, and
enable users to rapidly innovate,” said Thomas Hubauer, Portfolio
Project Manager for Knowledge Graph and Semantics at Siemens Corporate
Technology. “Siemens utilizes knowledge graph technology for
applications ranging from semantic master data management and production
monitoring, to finance and risk management. We are looking forward to
investigating how Amazon Neptune can drive a range of knowledge graph
use cases for our business and for our customers.”

About Amazon Web Services

For more than 11 years, Amazon Web Services has been the world’s most
comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platform. AWS offers over 100
fully featured services for compute, storage, databases, networking,
analytics, machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI), Internet
of Things (IoT), mobile, security, hybrid, and application development,
deployment, and management from 44 Availability Zones (AZs) across 16
geographic regions in the U.S., Australia, Brazil, Canada, China,
Germany, India, Ireland, Japan, Korea, Singapore, and the UK. AWS
services are trusted by millions of active customers around the
world—including the fastest-growing startups, largest enterprises, and
leading government agencies—to power their infrastructure, make them
more agile, and lower costs. To learn more about AWS, visit https://aws.amazon.com.

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